In 1998, Dijkstra began a series depicting young Israelis joining the army. In this diptych, the subject is pictured on the day she was inducted into the army, and then eight months later in her uniform. We might expect her fatigues to dampen her individuality, yet even in an army uniform, the young woman’s personality shines through, as evidenced by her still-intact dark eyeliner, wispy bangs, and sure gaze. In 2001, the ICA organized an exhibition of Dijkstra’s photography and video, one of her first solo museum shows in the United States.

During a project documenting refugees, six-year-old Almerisa, whose family fled Bosnia, asked Dijkstra to take her photo. Thus began Dijkstra’s serial project, tracing her subject’s transitions through both adolescence and relocation from East to West Europe.

Rineke Dijkstra has become well known for incisively direct photographic and video portraits of individuals in the midst of change, such as the diptych of an Israeli Army inductee already in the ICA collection. Odessa, Ukraine, August 11, 1993 faces us with a young boy in shorts and sandals clutching two unclothed dolls to his bare chest. The dolls’ pert plastic smiles and oversized bright eyes call attention to the boy’s comparatively vacant, stone-faced expression. Juxtaposing the childhood joy implied by the toys with a premature resignation glimpsed in her subject, Dijkstra hints at the fragility of hope, the fleetingness of youth, and an innocence soon to be lost.